Yep, makes perfect sense for Australia. Apple devices are popular and NFC merchant terminals have been widespread for years. Australian also has the highest rate of Visa payWave use of any country (for example 60.4% of in-person Visa transactions are contactless, compared with only 14% in Canada).

A big delay for rolling out Apple Pay in Australia is that Visa's local processing centre doesn't currently support tokens. Visa has stated that they will have it up and running "in 2015", while MasterCard's token system (called "Digital Enablement Service") is already available to banks. As usual Apple has made no comment on a timeframe, but you can expect that once Visa has the token service rolled out they, and Apple, be pushing the banks to adopt it and get things moving. We may end up waiting on the banks, though. "George Lawson, Visa's head of emerging products and innovation, said banks would need to establish extra fields in their payment systems to accept and recognise tokens rather than account numbers."

Yep, makes perfect sense for Australia. Apple devices are popular and NFC merchant terminals have been widespread for years. Australian also has the highest rate of Visa payWave use of any country (for example 60.4% of in-person Visa transactions are contactless, compared with only 14% in Canada).

A big delay for rolling out Apple Pay in Australia is that Visa's local processing centre doesn't currently support tokens. Visa has stated that they will have it up and running "in 2015", while MasterCard's token system (called "Digital Enablement Service") is already available to banks. As usual Apple has made no comment on a timeframe, but you can expect that once Visa has the token service rolled out they, and Apple, be pushing the banks to adopt it and get things moving. We may end up waiting on the banks, though. "George Lawson, Visa's head of emerging products and innovation, said banks would need to establish extra fields in their payment systems to accept and recognise tokens rather than account numbers."

Yep, makes perfect sense for Australia. Apple devices are popular and NFC merchant terminals have been widespread for years. Australian also has the highest rate of Visa payWave use of any country (for example 60.4% of in-person Visa transactions are contactless, compared with only 14% in Canada).

A big delay for rolling out Apple Pay in Australia is that Visa's local processing centre doesn't currently support tokens. Visa has stated that they will have it up and running "in 2015", while MasterCard's token system (called "Digital Enablement Service") is already available to banks. As usual Apple has made no comment on a timeframe, but you can expect that once Visa has the token service rolled out they, and Apple, be pushing the banks to adopt it and get things moving. We may end up waiting on the banks, though. "George Lawson, Visa's head of emerging products and innovation, said banks would need to establish extra fields in their payment systems to accept and recognise tokens rather than account numbers."

So I don't think we'll see it this year, but here's hoping for 2016?

Click to expand...

Well, VISA is not the only one. AMEX is very well established in Australia and is now including "chips" on their cards to comply with "pay as you go" system, so what gives...?
I'm thinking that Apple is still negotiating in regards to their percentage per transactions in Australia and Banks don't want to give in to Apples conditions - greedy bustards on both ends

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